Gilding of Lily
Fishnets. Fishnets and nerve. That’s all she would need. Fingertips float an inch from the frosted glass, wanting to reach out and grab one of the women on the street below. Women, could she call them that? They seemed much bigger, much more powerful than just mere women. They were women who screw for money. Vicious women. They weren’t marionette dolls, being pulled by strings. Everyone thought they were foul, scum of the earth, as her father liked to call them.
“Delilah,” he would begin, tightening his jaw, “there are two kinds of people in this world. There are the deserving, and then, there are all the rest of them.” Them, he would spit as he curled his upper lip, which he had a tendency of doing when he was disgusted. He sounded as if he was speaking of a different species, a hated species. She always winced when he said that. It wasn’t fair, that bitterness. She held back saying that to her father. He wouldn’t like to hear how she thought they were the ones who had all the power, they were the beauties, they were the real humans. To be so raw, so rubbed clean of society’s code of etiquette, left only a human, which was exactly what those women represented.
Delilah watched them sway from one car to the next. If she could, she would bring them all right up to her bare apartment, she would plead with them, “Tell me how you do it. Teach me your ways. Please. I want to learn.” She would say, “Pretend you are on the street. Show me how.” They would ridicule her, spit in her face, and cuss something awful. She couldn’t do that though, bring them up to the apartment, where her husband was asleep in the next room over, and her life is made up of everything decent. She will just have to learn from her perch high above them. Her apartment in Montmartre, Paris, overlooks the Rue des 3 Frères. Artists and poets sit along the sidewalk in the daytime, but it is now spotted with women in their coarse fur coats, and five inch heels, taking long drags on their cigarettes. Spindly arms hinged on sharp shoulders, stroke the air as they bring the cigarette up to their thin lips, their chests rising as if their life depended on the poison. Smoke drifts out the mouth, and floods up the nose. There’s a reason it’s called the French inhale. Perfection. They seem as if they were born for it.
Five years old and her mother would tell her to never look them in the eye. They were evils, she would call them. Never look them in the eye, or in the mouth because you never knew what was going to come out of it. She didn’t care if they were evils, she looked them square in the eye, looked at their twisted mouths and found them so beautiful, the way they lurked below, the way their eyes were so dark. They were so exotic compared to her mother and all the people who came for tea, and attended the extravagant dinner parties.
Delilah looked across to her antiqued wooden coffee table. On it sat the letter addressed to a Delilah Bellamont, with no return address.
Lily, it began, I am so terribly sorry I poisoned your mind with the ramblings of a madman. I hope one day you will be able to forgive me of my erroneous instruction.
The letter was blank besides those two sentences. Delilah knew who the letter was from, of course. The only person who ever called her Lily, who came up with the nickname, is regretting all he ever taught her. His teachings are constantly on her mind, blurring the line between right and wrong. Her mind skips back to that day when he said to her, “Lily, that is what I’ll call you from now on, because you’re no longer the delilah flower, you are now the lily, a spiritually advanced individual.” Delilah being only seven at that point thought the man crazy, raving about only God knows what. She would sit for hours listening to his rants, focusing on the dust floating through the air, caught in rays of sunlight, but after awhile she learned that language of his, listening to the rhythm and static of what he was saying. His lessons became music, fluttering through her mind, intensifying and transforming. After twenty-five years, her eyes would still drift closed in the middle of her meetings by the luring of the song. Her hand would flutter with the beat while reaching for milk in the grocery store. The man was a profound and brilliant person. What’s happened that made him take back all he’s taught her throughout the years?
The clothes she wore the day before lay scattered throughout the apartment. A white silk blouse is carelessly thrown over the sofa, crème colored high-waisted pants stay crumpled dejectedly on the hickory floor, one of her nude leather, Louboutin pumps poke out from under the dining room table. With the wardrobe she has, she could be just about any Parisian woman on the street, dodging taxis, and sipping at her coffee from Café de Flore. She calls it drab-chic. It’s all the same, with all of the beiges and whites. There is not a drop of color, not an ounce of flare. Even her apartment is void of vividness, everything pale, except for her that is. Her obsidian hair, often pulled back into tight buns is striking compared to the colors she keeps herself swathed in. Her wide eyes masked in envy, makes others regard her differently than they would if they had not caught sight of them. Her smooth, olive colored skin flushes in the waning light from the street below.
Her gaze wanders back out the window.
“Oh,” she sighs, “look at them move.” Long nailed fingers trace their way up the man’s shoulder, to his ear. Thighs press against thighs creating the friction in her mind. Tongues pressed against teeth, causing knees to go weak. Whispers find their way along the avenue, up to the long-legged girls, and into the waiting car. Pressing her forehead up against the window, she recalls when she first started watching the women at night. It was not that long ago, a month at the most. The night she started, she had cut her hip open on a jagged edge on the railing coming up to the apartment. Twenty stitches it took to sew her up. The painkillers made her nauseous so she sat up for a while, wandering about the apartment until she caught sight of them down below. They were magnificent. The street light they stood under made it seem as if they had an aura around them. Every night they are out there, and so is she, cheek pressed against glass, the only way she feels she can get close enough.
The night seems to last forever as she watches women and men playing at a game she will never know. She tiptoes into the bedroom, lying next to the sleeping figure of her husband, not wanting to wake him, for fear of him seeing what is so clearly written on her face. She watches him for awhile, feeling strange for being so near a person she doesn’t even care for. Sometimes she feels as though she were the one handcuffed to the bedpost, a prisoner in this marriage. The only thing she truly likes about him is his dimples when he smiles, and he only seems to smile when he sleeps.
Delilah awakens to snores and sunlight cascading through the open shades. She nudges him with her elbow.
“Hey, it’s six twenty. You’re late.” His eyes open slowly, not quite taking in everything she’s said. “Did you hear me? It’s twenty after six,” she says with another, sharper jab. His eyes fly open, knowing he has to be out of the apartment in ten minutes.
“Jesus, why didn’t you wake me sooner?” He swings his legs over the bed, his back facing Delilah, just as it always is.
Work doesn’t start until nine that day, so she lingers in the large bed, enjoying the time alone. After a while, her longing for coffee sets it. The chipped mug in the back of the cupboard stares her down, as she wonders what it would be like to be sipped out of little by little. The coffee is a deep brown, spilling over the sides of the gray mug, and dripping down to Delilah’s wrist. She sits on the sofa, and blots at the sticky sweetness dribbling down her arm, and dropping on the paper, distorting the words. Her shelves are lined with Ethiopian, Columbian and Indonesian coffees. As she sips the dark brew, she imagines fusing herself with the people picking the small, magenta berries that carry the treasured coffee bean. Her bare feet, curled underneath her, go numb at the toes as she curses her broken heater. She saunters over to the oven, turns it to four hundred and fifty degrees, and lights it from underneath, keeping it open in hope of warming the apartment, if only just a few degrees. Nothing seems to work anymore, including the dullness of her marriage.
During her shower, she remembers when they used to hold hands walking down the street, because it was the proper thing to do. She remembers how numb her mind was when she accepted his marriage proposal. There, she thought, Mom and Dad should be proud this time. What she doesn’t remember though, is the glow just underneath her skin she would see in the mirror every morning. She doesn’t remember the tingle in her stomach when he pulled in the driveway every evening after a day at work. She doesn’t remember the ecstasy she felt on the night of her wedding. She doesn’t remember any of these things because none of them ever happened. She just needed a person, any person of the right status to keep her parents off her back. That is what her husband is. A person. That’s all.
Everything else she has is inside her, right where her tutor placed it. She learned of Galileo being the first person to notice flaws on the sun. She learned the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the way he felt about the human race being disgusted of their evolution from ape to human, but making the connection that today’s humans will not be any better than apes to the next breed of humans… man is something that shall be overcome. She rehearsed the tune of Dante’s Commedia, and the ways of the sinners, the fate of greed and betrayal. She also learned to question everything, including herself. How could her mentor want to take that all back, the one thing that has guided her so well through this life?
On the way to her office, something catches her eye in a shop window. Crimson suede heels, with a large bow on the back sit there, waiting for her.
“Oh my…,” she breathes. Her heart hammers in her chest. Her mind is telling her to march in the store and take hold of those shoes like she’s in control of herself, but she just can’t seem to make her feet move. Her reflection stares back at her, daring her. Her green eyes glisten, reminding her of her desire. She steps through the door as the woman at the register asks if there is anything she can help with. Delilah steps over to the shoes, touching the bow, soft on her fingertips.
“I’ll take these,” Delilah says over her shoulder, checking the tag.
Delilah peeks a glance into one of the shop windows, watching herself walk down the street, the bow on the shoes bouncing ever so slightly with every footfall. Her hair makes long ringlets over her collar bone, bouncing in sync with the bows. She smirks, thinking of what her husband will say to her tonight. Maybe, “Where in the hell did you get those shoes?” Maybe, “Since when have you had curly hair?” Maybe he won’t even notice.
When Delilah reaches her office, she looks up, just as she always does, and says hello to the emblematic pigeon on the façade of the building. Le Monde, the liberal magazine she is front page editor of, just became one of the number one leading magazines in Paris. The security guard at the front desk looks over as Delilah walks through the door and smiles as her new shoes click-clack on the marble floor.
As the doors of the elevator open on the third floor, three people turn towards her, talking over one another.
“The Soviet Union’s collapsed. The leaders of the four Republics announced it this morning in Belarus,” one of the men informs her while walking briskly alongside.
“Why didn’t you call to tell me?” Delilah asks, quickening her pace.
After work, Delilah walks along the boulevard towards the restaurant, just as she does every Monday to meet friends for drinks. Two women walk at a leisurely pace along the sidewalk, making it impossible to pass by them. At one point, passing a downtrodden building with women perusing the street before them, the blonde whose freckles look as if they were placed quite carefully on her face, like drawn on chicken pocks, remarks how pitiful it is to see the women along the street, “chasing freedom by whoring around.” Delilah stops, as one of the women looks behind her, and turns around, back to her apartment.
Walking towards her building, she notices one of the women who frequents the sidewalk, while haughtily calling out to the people passing by, is not in her place next to the others. Delilah’s stride lengthens as she makes her way across the street and up the steps. Once in the apartment she unearths the black, gridded stockings, from inside her Chanel handbag, lacing her fingers through the material, bringing them up to her chest, holding them tight to her, and breathing them in. Delilah pulls them on, pointing her toes, careful not to tear them. She shuffles over to her closet and shrugs into her leopard print fur coat, and pulls her black, Hermès miniskirt up tight over her hips, rubbing her thumb across the light scar along her hipbone. Heavy, coal eyeliner is rimmed around her eyes, making her feel, for once, like Lily. She stands taller, chin up, eyes deadly, ebony hair wild around her gaunt face. Her eyelids seem almost translucent as she takes herself in, succumbing to the effects of the metamorphosis. On her way out, the doorknob sticks, making a final protest against her decision. She yanks hard, the door surrendering to her intent.
The women across the road all catch sight of her at once. Some cock their heads like bewildered puppies, others have knowing smirks pulling at the corners of their lips. Lily struts heel-toe, heel-toe, all the way across the street, one hand on her hip, elbow jutting out, just like a runway model. One red shoe mounts the curb, then the other.
“Anyone have a Gitanes?” She purrs, looking straight into the yellowing eyes of the closest woman, just as she did when she was a little girl. The woman pulls the blue box from the waistband of her skirt, tapping a cigarette out and handing it to Lily. The box in which she pulled the cigarette from has a gypsy woman on the front of it. How fitting. The woman taps one out for herself and lights them both with a red metal lighter. There’s a reason it’s called the French inhale. Perfection. It seems as if we were born for it.
Lily watches the woman suck the smoke in, her eyes rolling back, gold eyeliner sparkling like the stars. Dark brown stains and lumps freckle the right side of the woman’s outstretched neck, half hidden by the tight black curls shooting out from her head. Her eyes land on Lily, snarling, she brushes more hair in front of her neck, covering the rash.
“Once you got the worm, spread it.” The woman says, puckering her lips, raising her eyebrows as if challenging Lily.
A black town car pulls slowly up to the curb, taking Lily’s focus off the woman’s confession, and turning it, in turn to the car’s tinted back window which is being slowly rolled down. Lily finds herself making her way over to the car as a man in a deep blue suit leans forward, just enough where the shadow cuts across and covers his eyes. He smiles nice and deep. Dimples. One on either side, stabbing into Lily.
“Hey sweetheart,” he croons. Lily leans down into the window, resting her elbows on the door frame, her face lit by the overhead streetlight. “You wanna go for a ride?” He says, his eyes alight, not recognizing the person standing before him. The smile is still full blast, the dimples pock marking his cheeks.
Her hands push off from the car, her voice smiling, looking towards the woman who tipped her the cigarette. “Why don’t you ask one of these other girls? I’m sure they’d love to take you for a ride.”
*
The window’s frosted glass calls her name again each night. As she rolls over, bumping into her husband, Delilah feels the tug of the night in her chest, grabbing a hold of her collarbone and peeling her out of the sheets. Her toes touch down flat on the wood of the floor, acclimating with the weight of her body, her mind dotting out the spots on the ground where it creaks with her movement. Sliding along in the dark, meager light trickling in from the street, she closes her eyes, making her way through the apartment by memory. Her legs take her straight to the window. She sees her hair in her reflection, a wild flowing mass down to her elbows, lightest at night when it’s free to release all her secrets.
The daytime, showing all the bumps and scars persuades her she doesn’t belong. The purple spots cluster on the roof of Delilah’s mouth, and line the underside of her arms. Waking up in the morning, she walks to the bathroom, eyes half open, seeing if they’ve spread overnight, worrying about covering them for the interview later that day. Her dermatologist pointed it out the week before, said he’d seen it before while traveling through Botswana. Many things he said it could be, Purpura, Kaposi Sarcoma, Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
“Have you traveled lately?” He said, motioning for her to open her mouth.
“Not recently. I went to Israel six months ago for work, but was only there for three days.”
“I’m going to send you over to the oncologist for a biopsy so we can see if there’s anything we should be concerned about.” He patted Delilah’s shoulder and gave her a generous smile.
Walking home, she passed by the women who were sauntering back and forth in the crisp air across the street from Delilah’s apartment. Anouska and Nina were in fur, with their tight little skirts underneath, not even visible. Virginie leaned back on the graffiti covered stone wall behind her, dropping her hands to either side of her thighs, following Delilah with her eyes as she walked by. When Delilah first met Virginie, she told her the roots of her name. Virginie snickered and said, “Much irony, no?” When Delilah finally went down to join them after months of keeping her body pressed against the coolness of the window, watching them below her apartment move about in such a painstakingly casual manner, she could feel herself warming to them in a way her mother would have slapped her for. Her husband never woke in the morning when she came in smelling of Gauloises and an array of French colognes, nor did he ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering where she had gone.
Nina stopped her that day, when she was walking back from the dermatologist’s and pulled her into the doorway of a closed café. Nina’s face had the sharp angles of an underfed child, with eyes that seemed to suck in all the nourishment, always silvery and focused.
“Lily, why have you not been to zee us? We zee you, sitting up in your window each night. Zou don’t fool us, staying in ze dark like that. We are not stupide, mon amour.” Her eyes rounded with coal, were soft for once, playing with the light reflecting off the cars.
“I’ve just come from the doctor’s, Nina. They took a piece of my skin, here,” as I lifted my arm and showed her the spots, she gasped. Delilah nodded. “I had a feeling that’s what it was. Don’t tell the others. Not yet. I want to talk to Josette first.”
Nina moved about, twisting her heel into the crack in the cement. Her lips thinned.
“Josette’s gone, Lily.”
“When? When did she go? Why has no one told me?” Delilah took quick little breaths, wondering if her ears had heard wrong. “Nina! Where did she go?”
Nina folded her bony arms over her chest. “We don’t know. It’s ozy been a week. But zee was with someone, zen deedn’t come back.”
Delilah spun around quickly, the red bows on the back of her heels bouncing slightly. Up the stairs, she doubled over, gasping, flashing quickly to how easy it would be to take a slight misstep and land at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Instead, her knees hit the cement and sent a sharp jab up her right leg to the scar lining her hip. Josette gone. A door slamming shut above her, moved her to her feet and back down the stairs.
Hospitals, shelters, crack houses she knew Josette had been to previously had not seen her for months. Delilah thought of the tight, frizzy curls surrounding Josette’s face, shooting out like millions of tiny little springs. The freckles on her face dotted in Delilah’s memory like a constellation engrained in an astronomer’s mind.
A year before, Delilah had argued with herself every night while sitting in front of that window whether to go down there and stand beside the dark-skinned fille belle. Finally, she had done it. She walked right down there one night, past the tourists and the poets on the sidewalk. She strutted heel-toe, heel-toe right up to Josette and asked for a cigarette. She gave one to her too. Pulled two out, stuck them between her crimson lips, lit them both up with her red metal lighter and handed one to Delilah, just as she noticed the faint purple spots running the length of Josette’s neck. Josette rocked beside Delilah. She noticed Delilah looking at the spots, snarled, plumped her hair to cover it.
“Once you got the worm, spread it.” Her dark eyes Delilah remembers, were on her without blinking.
“Lily. I’m Lily.” Delilah managed to say before a black town car rolled up slowly, and stopped right in front of her. She learned the meaning of spreading the worm quite quickly, even if she didn’t realize she was participating.
After Delilah’s morning of scrubbing at the bumps on her skin, desperate for them to wash off with the rest of the filth of the night, she was walking in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris along Bis Rue Bougainville to an interview she had with Lionel Jospin, one of the Socialist party candidates, when she noticed a flash of dark curls, and the sway of the hips of a finely dressed woman. Delilah’s heels click-clacked as she kept her eyes on the woman and started into a run. Reaching out, she a put a hand on the woman’s sharp shoulder, noticing the fading spots along the neck behind her ear.
“Josette? Is that you?” Delilah shrank back in Josette’s glare.
“Lily, how did you find me? What are you doing here?” Josette turned to move into the house, but Delilah tightened her grip on her shoulder, moving her hand down her arm and tugging at her elbow.
“Who are you? You, who was the reason I was down there in the first place. You just disappeared.” Her voice shook almost to a stutter. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to find something familiar in the face of the one standing in front of her. Trying to find the things that kept her sane.
“I am Émilie Lamoreux, the wife of Philippe Lamoreux, a member of the Sénat.” Josette said, straightening her shoulders, pulling her elbow from Delilah’s grip.
Delilah stared at her, taking in the vast difference in her appearance. No longer did she wear the crimson lipstick, which was replaced now by a soft nude. No longer did she wear fishnets snaking up her legs; instead she wore crème colored pants tightly hugging her small waist and rounded hips. Her freckles hadn’t disappeared, but even those changed shape right before her eyes.
Delilah’s mouth hung open, until she said, “It was Kaposi Sarcoma wasn’t it? The worm? You gave me cancer.”
*
The stage she stood on was one of predilection turned to disgust. As she watched Josette’s face keep its cool pallor, she saw the discovery of her sickness had been no surprise. Her mother had warned her, and as the sourness in her chest tugged its way deep into her gut, she fought off the urge to rip it out and throw it far from where she stood.
“But you knew. How could you not have told us?” Delilah squeezed her eyes shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. “How could you?” Her hand flung from her face, hitting Josette’s cheek with a sharp crack. Pulling back, she noticed the spot where her wedding ring split the skin above Josette’s cheekbone open. Her heart beat erratically as she stood there and watched Josette turn towards her door, and disappear inside. The door shut with a soft click. Delilah stood on the sidewalk, following Josette’s movements through the upstairs’ windows, watching as she slipped out of her pants and unbuttoned her blouse. She moved her eyes away as Josette pulled the sheer lace of her bra over her head, and looped her fingers underneath the band of her underwear. Delilah stood there horrified at how much power this one person had over her. Josette made no move to close the blinds and Delilah wondered if she was always like this, or whether being on the street had changed her.
Josette’s cheek was already bruising, matching the color of her nipples. The burnt umber of her skin created a sharp silhouette against the backdrop of the sun on the white marble walls of her bathroom. Delilah thought about the strange reversal of their roles, Josette now being the contrasted figure in the window above the street. So many people warned her of the damage another person could do to her, if she cared enough to let them. A strange sound burst through the air, rising erratically, and descending to a short hiccup. Delilah realized the sound came from her own throat, but there was nothing she could do to cut it off sooner.
Delilah turned and forced herself to walk towards the Métro. For the first time, she ached for her husband, knowing she could ground herself with the familiarity of his callousness. On the M8, she listened to the scattered conversations. A gruff voice rose in the seat behind her.
“Jospin haz no tazent fo vinning. Ze moves zee’s made for ze party eez detrimental to ze ‘ole election.” As she listened to the man stringing out his argument, she remembered the interview she was on her way towards when she came across Josette. Le Monde’s executive editor was impartial to the piece in the first place, knowing Jospin’s spin on the election was visibly lacking in logic, but Jospin’s party’s incessant calls to the newspaper and finally his generous donation was what caused them to setup an interview.
“Delilah,” he would begin, tightening his jaw, “there are two kinds of people in this world. There are the deserving, and then, there are all the rest of them.” Them, he would spit as he curled his upper lip, which he had a tendency of doing when he was disgusted. He sounded as if he was speaking of a different species, a hated species. She always winced when he said that. It wasn’t fair, that bitterness. She held back saying that to her father. He wouldn’t like to hear how she thought they were the ones who had all the power, they were the beauties, they were the real humans. To be so raw, so rubbed clean of society’s code of etiquette, left only a human, which was exactly what those women represented.
Delilah watched them sway from one car to the next. If she could, she would bring them all right up to her bare apartment, she would plead with them, “Tell me how you do it. Teach me your ways. Please. I want to learn.” She would say, “Pretend you are on the street. Show me how.” They would ridicule her, spit in her face, and cuss something awful. She couldn’t do that though, bring them up to the apartment, where her husband was asleep in the next room over, and her life is made up of everything decent. She will just have to learn from her perch high above them. Her apartment in Montmartre, Paris, overlooks the Rue des 3 Frères. Artists and poets sit along the sidewalk in the daytime, but it is now spotted with women in their coarse fur coats, and five inch heels, taking long drags on their cigarettes. Spindly arms hinged on sharp shoulders, stroke the air as they bring the cigarette up to their thin lips, their chests rising as if their life depended on the poison. Smoke drifts out the mouth, and floods up the nose. There’s a reason it’s called the French inhale. Perfection. They seem as if they were born for it.
Five years old and her mother would tell her to never look them in the eye. They were evils, she would call them. Never look them in the eye, or in the mouth because you never knew what was going to come out of it. She didn’t care if they were evils, she looked them square in the eye, looked at their twisted mouths and found them so beautiful, the way they lurked below, the way their eyes were so dark. They were so exotic compared to her mother and all the people who came for tea, and attended the extravagant dinner parties.
Delilah looked across to her antiqued wooden coffee table. On it sat the letter addressed to a Delilah Bellamont, with no return address.
Lily, it began, I am so terribly sorry I poisoned your mind with the ramblings of a madman. I hope one day you will be able to forgive me of my erroneous instruction.
The letter was blank besides those two sentences. Delilah knew who the letter was from, of course. The only person who ever called her Lily, who came up with the nickname, is regretting all he ever taught her. His teachings are constantly on her mind, blurring the line between right and wrong. Her mind skips back to that day when he said to her, “Lily, that is what I’ll call you from now on, because you’re no longer the delilah flower, you are now the lily, a spiritually advanced individual.” Delilah being only seven at that point thought the man crazy, raving about only God knows what. She would sit for hours listening to his rants, focusing on the dust floating through the air, caught in rays of sunlight, but after awhile she learned that language of his, listening to the rhythm and static of what he was saying. His lessons became music, fluttering through her mind, intensifying and transforming. After twenty-five years, her eyes would still drift closed in the middle of her meetings by the luring of the song. Her hand would flutter with the beat while reaching for milk in the grocery store. The man was a profound and brilliant person. What’s happened that made him take back all he’s taught her throughout the years?
The clothes she wore the day before lay scattered throughout the apartment. A white silk blouse is carelessly thrown over the sofa, crème colored high-waisted pants stay crumpled dejectedly on the hickory floor, one of her nude leather, Louboutin pumps poke out from under the dining room table. With the wardrobe she has, she could be just about any Parisian woman on the street, dodging taxis, and sipping at her coffee from Café de Flore. She calls it drab-chic. It’s all the same, with all of the beiges and whites. There is not a drop of color, not an ounce of flare. Even her apartment is void of vividness, everything pale, except for her that is. Her obsidian hair, often pulled back into tight buns is striking compared to the colors she keeps herself swathed in. Her wide eyes masked in envy, makes others regard her differently than they would if they had not caught sight of them. Her smooth, olive colored skin flushes in the waning light from the street below.
Her gaze wanders back out the window.
“Oh,” she sighs, “look at them move.” Long nailed fingers trace their way up the man’s shoulder, to his ear. Thighs press against thighs creating the friction in her mind. Tongues pressed against teeth, causing knees to go weak. Whispers find their way along the avenue, up to the long-legged girls, and into the waiting car. Pressing her forehead up against the window, she recalls when she first started watching the women at night. It was not that long ago, a month at the most. The night she started, she had cut her hip open on a jagged edge on the railing coming up to the apartment. Twenty stitches it took to sew her up. The painkillers made her nauseous so she sat up for a while, wandering about the apartment until she caught sight of them down below. They were magnificent. The street light they stood under made it seem as if they had an aura around them. Every night they are out there, and so is she, cheek pressed against glass, the only way she feels she can get close enough.
The night seems to last forever as she watches women and men playing at a game she will never know. She tiptoes into the bedroom, lying next to the sleeping figure of her husband, not wanting to wake him, for fear of him seeing what is so clearly written on her face. She watches him for awhile, feeling strange for being so near a person she doesn’t even care for. Sometimes she feels as though she were the one handcuffed to the bedpost, a prisoner in this marriage. The only thing she truly likes about him is his dimples when he smiles, and he only seems to smile when he sleeps.
Delilah awakens to snores and sunlight cascading through the open shades. She nudges him with her elbow.
“Hey, it’s six twenty. You’re late.” His eyes open slowly, not quite taking in everything she’s said. “Did you hear me? It’s twenty after six,” she says with another, sharper jab. His eyes fly open, knowing he has to be out of the apartment in ten minutes.
“Jesus, why didn’t you wake me sooner?” He swings his legs over the bed, his back facing Delilah, just as it always is.
Work doesn’t start until nine that day, so she lingers in the large bed, enjoying the time alone. After a while, her longing for coffee sets it. The chipped mug in the back of the cupboard stares her down, as she wonders what it would be like to be sipped out of little by little. The coffee is a deep brown, spilling over the sides of the gray mug, and dripping down to Delilah’s wrist. She sits on the sofa, and blots at the sticky sweetness dribbling down her arm, and dropping on the paper, distorting the words. Her shelves are lined with Ethiopian, Columbian and Indonesian coffees. As she sips the dark brew, she imagines fusing herself with the people picking the small, magenta berries that carry the treasured coffee bean. Her bare feet, curled underneath her, go numb at the toes as she curses her broken heater. She saunters over to the oven, turns it to four hundred and fifty degrees, and lights it from underneath, keeping it open in hope of warming the apartment, if only just a few degrees. Nothing seems to work anymore, including the dullness of her marriage.
During her shower, she remembers when they used to hold hands walking down the street, because it was the proper thing to do. She remembers how numb her mind was when she accepted his marriage proposal. There, she thought, Mom and Dad should be proud this time. What she doesn’t remember though, is the glow just underneath her skin she would see in the mirror every morning. She doesn’t remember the tingle in her stomach when he pulled in the driveway every evening after a day at work. She doesn’t remember the ecstasy she felt on the night of her wedding. She doesn’t remember any of these things because none of them ever happened. She just needed a person, any person of the right status to keep her parents off her back. That is what her husband is. A person. That’s all.
Everything else she has is inside her, right where her tutor placed it. She learned of Galileo being the first person to notice flaws on the sun. She learned the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the way he felt about the human race being disgusted of their evolution from ape to human, but making the connection that today’s humans will not be any better than apes to the next breed of humans… man is something that shall be overcome. She rehearsed the tune of Dante’s Commedia, and the ways of the sinners, the fate of greed and betrayal. She also learned to question everything, including herself. How could her mentor want to take that all back, the one thing that has guided her so well through this life?
On the way to her office, something catches her eye in a shop window. Crimson suede heels, with a large bow on the back sit there, waiting for her.
“Oh my…,” she breathes. Her heart hammers in her chest. Her mind is telling her to march in the store and take hold of those shoes like she’s in control of herself, but she just can’t seem to make her feet move. Her reflection stares back at her, daring her. Her green eyes glisten, reminding her of her desire. She steps through the door as the woman at the register asks if there is anything she can help with. Delilah steps over to the shoes, touching the bow, soft on her fingertips.
“I’ll take these,” Delilah says over her shoulder, checking the tag.
Delilah peeks a glance into one of the shop windows, watching herself walk down the street, the bow on the shoes bouncing ever so slightly with every footfall. Her hair makes long ringlets over her collar bone, bouncing in sync with the bows. She smirks, thinking of what her husband will say to her tonight. Maybe, “Where in the hell did you get those shoes?” Maybe, “Since when have you had curly hair?” Maybe he won’t even notice.
When Delilah reaches her office, she looks up, just as she always does, and says hello to the emblematic pigeon on the façade of the building. Le Monde, the liberal magazine she is front page editor of, just became one of the number one leading magazines in Paris. The security guard at the front desk looks over as Delilah walks through the door and smiles as her new shoes click-clack on the marble floor.
As the doors of the elevator open on the third floor, three people turn towards her, talking over one another.
“The Soviet Union’s collapsed. The leaders of the four Republics announced it this morning in Belarus,” one of the men informs her while walking briskly alongside.
“Why didn’t you call to tell me?” Delilah asks, quickening her pace.
After work, Delilah walks along the boulevard towards the restaurant, just as she does every Monday to meet friends for drinks. Two women walk at a leisurely pace along the sidewalk, making it impossible to pass by them. At one point, passing a downtrodden building with women perusing the street before them, the blonde whose freckles look as if they were placed quite carefully on her face, like drawn on chicken pocks, remarks how pitiful it is to see the women along the street, “chasing freedom by whoring around.” Delilah stops, as one of the women looks behind her, and turns around, back to her apartment.
Walking towards her building, she notices one of the women who frequents the sidewalk, while haughtily calling out to the people passing by, is not in her place next to the others. Delilah’s stride lengthens as she makes her way across the street and up the steps. Once in the apartment she unearths the black, gridded stockings, from inside her Chanel handbag, lacing her fingers through the material, bringing them up to her chest, holding them tight to her, and breathing them in. Delilah pulls them on, pointing her toes, careful not to tear them. She shuffles over to her closet and shrugs into her leopard print fur coat, and pulls her black, Hermès miniskirt up tight over her hips, rubbing her thumb across the light scar along her hipbone. Heavy, coal eyeliner is rimmed around her eyes, making her feel, for once, like Lily. She stands taller, chin up, eyes deadly, ebony hair wild around her gaunt face. Her eyelids seem almost translucent as she takes herself in, succumbing to the effects of the metamorphosis. On her way out, the doorknob sticks, making a final protest against her decision. She yanks hard, the door surrendering to her intent.
The women across the road all catch sight of her at once. Some cock their heads like bewildered puppies, others have knowing smirks pulling at the corners of their lips. Lily struts heel-toe, heel-toe, all the way across the street, one hand on her hip, elbow jutting out, just like a runway model. One red shoe mounts the curb, then the other.
“Anyone have a Gitanes?” She purrs, looking straight into the yellowing eyes of the closest woman, just as she did when she was a little girl. The woman pulls the blue box from the waistband of her skirt, tapping a cigarette out and handing it to Lily. The box in which she pulled the cigarette from has a gypsy woman on the front of it. How fitting. The woman taps one out for herself and lights them both with a red metal lighter. There’s a reason it’s called the French inhale. Perfection. It seems as if we were born for it.
Lily watches the woman suck the smoke in, her eyes rolling back, gold eyeliner sparkling like the stars. Dark brown stains and lumps freckle the right side of the woman’s outstretched neck, half hidden by the tight black curls shooting out from her head. Her eyes land on Lily, snarling, she brushes more hair in front of her neck, covering the rash.
“Once you got the worm, spread it.” The woman says, puckering her lips, raising her eyebrows as if challenging Lily.
A black town car pulls slowly up to the curb, taking Lily’s focus off the woman’s confession, and turning it, in turn to the car’s tinted back window which is being slowly rolled down. Lily finds herself making her way over to the car as a man in a deep blue suit leans forward, just enough where the shadow cuts across and covers his eyes. He smiles nice and deep. Dimples. One on either side, stabbing into Lily.
“Hey sweetheart,” he croons. Lily leans down into the window, resting her elbows on the door frame, her face lit by the overhead streetlight. “You wanna go for a ride?” He says, his eyes alight, not recognizing the person standing before him. The smile is still full blast, the dimples pock marking his cheeks.
Her hands push off from the car, her voice smiling, looking towards the woman who tipped her the cigarette. “Why don’t you ask one of these other girls? I’m sure they’d love to take you for a ride.”
*
The window’s frosted glass calls her name again each night. As she rolls over, bumping into her husband, Delilah feels the tug of the night in her chest, grabbing a hold of her collarbone and peeling her out of the sheets. Her toes touch down flat on the wood of the floor, acclimating with the weight of her body, her mind dotting out the spots on the ground where it creaks with her movement. Sliding along in the dark, meager light trickling in from the street, she closes her eyes, making her way through the apartment by memory. Her legs take her straight to the window. She sees her hair in her reflection, a wild flowing mass down to her elbows, lightest at night when it’s free to release all her secrets.
The daytime, showing all the bumps and scars persuades her she doesn’t belong. The purple spots cluster on the roof of Delilah’s mouth, and line the underside of her arms. Waking up in the morning, she walks to the bathroom, eyes half open, seeing if they’ve spread overnight, worrying about covering them for the interview later that day. Her dermatologist pointed it out the week before, said he’d seen it before while traveling through Botswana. Many things he said it could be, Purpura, Kaposi Sarcoma, Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
“Have you traveled lately?” He said, motioning for her to open her mouth.
“Not recently. I went to Israel six months ago for work, but was only there for three days.”
“I’m going to send you over to the oncologist for a biopsy so we can see if there’s anything we should be concerned about.” He patted Delilah’s shoulder and gave her a generous smile.
Walking home, she passed by the women who were sauntering back and forth in the crisp air across the street from Delilah’s apartment. Anouska and Nina were in fur, with their tight little skirts underneath, not even visible. Virginie leaned back on the graffiti covered stone wall behind her, dropping her hands to either side of her thighs, following Delilah with her eyes as she walked by. When Delilah first met Virginie, she told her the roots of her name. Virginie snickered and said, “Much irony, no?” When Delilah finally went down to join them after months of keeping her body pressed against the coolness of the window, watching them below her apartment move about in such a painstakingly casual manner, she could feel herself warming to them in a way her mother would have slapped her for. Her husband never woke in the morning when she came in smelling of Gauloises and an array of French colognes, nor did he ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering where she had gone.
Nina stopped her that day, when she was walking back from the dermatologist’s and pulled her into the doorway of a closed café. Nina’s face had the sharp angles of an underfed child, with eyes that seemed to suck in all the nourishment, always silvery and focused.
“Lily, why have you not been to zee us? We zee you, sitting up in your window each night. Zou don’t fool us, staying in ze dark like that. We are not stupide, mon amour.” Her eyes rounded with coal, were soft for once, playing with the light reflecting off the cars.
“I’ve just come from the doctor’s, Nina. They took a piece of my skin, here,” as I lifted my arm and showed her the spots, she gasped. Delilah nodded. “I had a feeling that’s what it was. Don’t tell the others. Not yet. I want to talk to Josette first.”
Nina moved about, twisting her heel into the crack in the cement. Her lips thinned.
“Josette’s gone, Lily.”
“When? When did she go? Why has no one told me?” Delilah took quick little breaths, wondering if her ears had heard wrong. “Nina! Where did she go?”
Nina folded her bony arms over her chest. “We don’t know. It’s ozy been a week. But zee was with someone, zen deedn’t come back.”
Delilah spun around quickly, the red bows on the back of her heels bouncing slightly. Up the stairs, she doubled over, gasping, flashing quickly to how easy it would be to take a slight misstep and land at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Instead, her knees hit the cement and sent a sharp jab up her right leg to the scar lining her hip. Josette gone. A door slamming shut above her, moved her to her feet and back down the stairs.
Hospitals, shelters, crack houses she knew Josette had been to previously had not seen her for months. Delilah thought of the tight, frizzy curls surrounding Josette’s face, shooting out like millions of tiny little springs. The freckles on her face dotted in Delilah’s memory like a constellation engrained in an astronomer’s mind.
A year before, Delilah had argued with herself every night while sitting in front of that window whether to go down there and stand beside the dark-skinned fille belle. Finally, she had done it. She walked right down there one night, past the tourists and the poets on the sidewalk. She strutted heel-toe, heel-toe right up to Josette and asked for a cigarette. She gave one to her too. Pulled two out, stuck them between her crimson lips, lit them both up with her red metal lighter and handed one to Delilah, just as she noticed the faint purple spots running the length of Josette’s neck. Josette rocked beside Delilah. She noticed Delilah looking at the spots, snarled, plumped her hair to cover it.
“Once you got the worm, spread it.” Her dark eyes Delilah remembers, were on her without blinking.
“Lily. I’m Lily.” Delilah managed to say before a black town car rolled up slowly, and stopped right in front of her. She learned the meaning of spreading the worm quite quickly, even if she didn’t realize she was participating.
After Delilah’s morning of scrubbing at the bumps on her skin, desperate for them to wash off with the rest of the filth of the night, she was walking in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris along Bis Rue Bougainville to an interview she had with Lionel Jospin, one of the Socialist party candidates, when she noticed a flash of dark curls, and the sway of the hips of a finely dressed woman. Delilah’s heels click-clacked as she kept her eyes on the woman and started into a run. Reaching out, she a put a hand on the woman’s sharp shoulder, noticing the fading spots along the neck behind her ear.
“Josette? Is that you?” Delilah shrank back in Josette’s glare.
“Lily, how did you find me? What are you doing here?” Josette turned to move into the house, but Delilah tightened her grip on her shoulder, moving her hand down her arm and tugging at her elbow.
“Who are you? You, who was the reason I was down there in the first place. You just disappeared.” Her voice shook almost to a stutter. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to find something familiar in the face of the one standing in front of her. Trying to find the things that kept her sane.
“I am Émilie Lamoreux, the wife of Philippe Lamoreux, a member of the Sénat.” Josette said, straightening her shoulders, pulling her elbow from Delilah’s grip.
Delilah stared at her, taking in the vast difference in her appearance. No longer did she wear the crimson lipstick, which was replaced now by a soft nude. No longer did she wear fishnets snaking up her legs; instead she wore crème colored pants tightly hugging her small waist and rounded hips. Her freckles hadn’t disappeared, but even those changed shape right before her eyes.
Delilah’s mouth hung open, until she said, “It was Kaposi Sarcoma wasn’t it? The worm? You gave me cancer.”
*
The stage she stood on was one of predilection turned to disgust. As she watched Josette’s face keep its cool pallor, she saw the discovery of her sickness had been no surprise. Her mother had warned her, and as the sourness in her chest tugged its way deep into her gut, she fought off the urge to rip it out and throw it far from where she stood.
“But you knew. How could you not have told us?” Delilah squeezed her eyes shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. “How could you?” Her hand flung from her face, hitting Josette’s cheek with a sharp crack. Pulling back, she noticed the spot where her wedding ring split the skin above Josette’s cheekbone open. Her heart beat erratically as she stood there and watched Josette turn towards her door, and disappear inside. The door shut with a soft click. Delilah stood on the sidewalk, following Josette’s movements through the upstairs’ windows, watching as she slipped out of her pants and unbuttoned her blouse. She moved her eyes away as Josette pulled the sheer lace of her bra over her head, and looped her fingers underneath the band of her underwear. Delilah stood there horrified at how much power this one person had over her. Josette made no move to close the blinds and Delilah wondered if she was always like this, or whether being on the street had changed her.
Josette’s cheek was already bruising, matching the color of her nipples. The burnt umber of her skin created a sharp silhouette against the backdrop of the sun on the white marble walls of her bathroom. Delilah thought about the strange reversal of their roles, Josette now being the contrasted figure in the window above the street. So many people warned her of the damage another person could do to her, if she cared enough to let them. A strange sound burst through the air, rising erratically, and descending to a short hiccup. Delilah realized the sound came from her own throat, but there was nothing she could do to cut it off sooner.
Delilah turned and forced herself to walk towards the Métro. For the first time, she ached for her husband, knowing she could ground herself with the familiarity of his callousness. On the M8, she listened to the scattered conversations. A gruff voice rose in the seat behind her.
“Jospin haz no tazent fo vinning. Ze moves zee’s made for ze party eez detrimental to ze ‘ole election.” As she listened to the man stringing out his argument, she remembered the interview she was on her way towards when she came across Josette. Le Monde’s executive editor was impartial to the piece in the first place, knowing Jospin’s spin on the election was visibly lacking in logic, but Jospin’s party’s incessant calls to the newspaper and finally his generous donation was what caused them to setup an interview.